I'm the fella covering Colorado for the 2008 election. I can't wait to see how this election turns out and I am excited to be covering it.
The Roan Plateau is a huge swath of land that spans thousands acres on Colorado’s western slope. On August 14th, the Bureau of Land Management fetched $114 million from oil and gas companies for 55,000 acres on top of the Roan Plateau.
The main bidder was Vantage Energy, which purchased about 35,000 acres of the 55,000 acres up for lease.
Vantage is backed by two venture-capital funds — the Carlyle Group and Riverstone Energy,
51% of sale proceeds will go to the U.S. treasury and the other 49% will go to the state of Colorado.
Governor Ritter had proposed that the 55,000 acres leased by the Bureau of Land Management be leased over a period of time instead of all at once. This phase leasing strategy, according to Governor Ritter would have, “maximized the value of the natural-gas resource beneath the Roan over a longer period of time.”
However, no lease sale in the lower 48 states has ever generated that dollar figure according to, Bureau of Land Management officials.
According to Save the Roan Plateau, the lead organization that advocated for the protection of public lands on the Roan, the public lands generate almost $4 million dollars annually in recreational use. That sounds insignificant in comparison to the BLM’s 114 million dollar sale. However, how much oil and gas is really under the Roan Plateau and how much of it can fuel this nation’s energy needs?
According the Census bureau, there are close to 130 million households in the America. Regardless, America needs answers for its energy dependence and the Roan Plateau, according to some, may be able to ease that until current renewable energy technology becomes more reliant and dependable.